Will Rogers: A Political Life

Six. The Mayor of Beverly Hills

Six  The Mayor of Beverly Hills W hen Will Rogers stopped in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to give a lecture just before Christmas in 1926, he received a telegram from Douglas Fairbanks, the famed actor and a good friend, telling him that a group of prominent Californians had elected Rogers as the first mayor of Beverly Hills.1 In reality the mayor’s position was honorary and unofficial, as the president of the city’s board of trustees really ran the town government. But Governor Al Smith, New York City mayor Jimmy Walker, and even President Calvin Coolidge joined the charade, each sending Rogers a telegram congratulating him on his mayorship.2 In Los Angeles a week later, a large crowd met Rogers and his family at the train station and escorted them in a parade of forty Rolls-Royce limousines out Wilshire Boulevard. They stopped near the Beverly Hills Hotel, where, on a makeshift stage in front of several hundred local friends and fans, Fairbanks greeted them as master of ceremonies. After the Los Angeles Fire Department band serenaded the crowd with “The Old Gray Mare,” Rogers gave his inaugural speech in the midst of a driving downpour. “I am by no means the first Comedian Mayor,” he shouted through the raindrops. “That seems to be the one requirement of Mayor, I have never seen a Mayor that wasent funny.” He promised better government, but not necessarily honesty: Too many Mayors have been elected on honesty, That dont get you anywhere , John w davis ran on that last time for the Democrats, and Coolidge dident suggest it at all and Davis lost by 70 mil. Now I don’t say I will give the old Burg a honest adminsitarti but I will at least split 50 50 with you. I am bringing over a few of the syst[e]ms of Mussolini. There is the wisest cracking Wop in the world, every time he issues a statement it is a ifty [nifty?].3 Rogers delighted in his first election to political office, albeit in jest, and for a while signed his daily telegrams “His Honor the Mayor of Beverly Hills, California,” “the Meandering Mayor,” “the Seated Mayor,” “the Neutral Mayor,” and so on. His appointment did raise some eyebrows in Beverly Hills, prompting the town to create an official mayor the next year. He later claimed that the movie people impeached him because “they found out I was opposed to polygamy.”4 To this day, the town lists Will Rogers as its first mayor. The Beverly Hills mayorship was not the only “office” he held. In August 1927 the National Press Club “elected” him congressman-at-large, charging him with duties “to roam over the country, pry into the state of the Union, check up on prohibition enforcement and report at regular intervals to the National Press Club.”5 These honorary positions and other nominations for public office were, in a way, more than mere jokes and publicity stunts. There was a touch of wishful thinking in them, for Rogers represented what people really wanted out of their politicians—honesty, compassion, straight talk— but were not getting. The notion of Will Rogers in politics was a breath of fresh air in an atmosphere that, to many Americans, reeked with incompetence and corruption. After his mock inauguration as mayor, Rogers spent a two-week Christmas holiday with his family at their ranch in the Santa Monica Canyon. On Christmas Eve he helped the Salvation Army give a thousand Christmas baskets to the poor people of Los Angeles. He found time to play polo at a club near his home where, during the match, he was thrown from his mount, tumbled in an arc over his pony’s head, and landed in a heap. Luckily he was unhurt, and more important to the competitive Rogers, his team won.6 Soon after the New Year, Rogers returned to another busy lecture circuit, or, as he termed it, “barking for his dinner.”7 He planned to open in Detroit The Mayor of Beverly Hills [ 10 7 ] Rogers accepting the “mayorship” of Beverly Hills on January 6, 1927, but left early so he could stop in Chicago to meet with baseball commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Landis was then investigating charges that players had fixed games between the Detroit Tigers and Chicago White Sox ten years earlier. Like Billy Mitchell before, Landis was...